Shortly before it was his turn to launch off the blocks and power the Auburn men’s swimming team to another runaway victory, Matt Targett looked toward the crowd and raised his arms well above his head.

The gesture elicited a raucous response from the Auburn fans who packed the James C. Martin Aquatic Center all week long to watch the team dominate the field at the SEC Championships.

How Targett backed it up, storming the Tigers to an NCAA-record time in the 400-yard freestyle relay, served as an ode to his coach Richard Quick, who met with the four-man team shortly before the meet’s final race.

“He’s an integral part of all our lives,” Targett said of Quick, who was diagnosed with an inoperable malignant brain tumor in late December. “We really wanted to show him how much he meant to us, and that’s our way of doing it.”

The Auburn men did it about as big as they ever have through their now 13-year streak of supremacy in the SEC. The Tigers ran away with the four-day meet, tallying 880.5 points. The margin of victory (253.5 points more than second-place Florida) was the second-largest in team history and third-most in SEC history.

A one-two finish in platform diving by Dan Mazzaferro and Kelly Marx helped bump that total – the fifth-most in SEC history. Shortly after the meet, men’s diving coach Jeff Shaffer took home Men’s Diving Coach of the Year honors.

If that’s what Coach Quick wanted, he certainly got it.

“The team just tried to focus on winning, that’s what Richard wanted us to do, just finish the job,” interim coach Brett Hawke said.

“We stayed focused throughout the whole meet and now it’s just a feeling of relief that we won and Richard was here to see it.”

The Auburn women had similar success on their turn at the 400-freestyle relay, as Ava Ohlgren, Arianna Vanderpool-Wallace, Melissa Marik and Caitlin Geary beat Georgia by more than a second. The victory vaulted Auburn ahead of Georgia to finish in second place for the meet, just 13.5 points behind SEC champion Florida.

“We’ve had a really rough year,” Geary said. “We haven’t been able to come together as a team before now, and we did it. We fought as hard as we could.”

The Auburn women came into this year’s SEC Championships having won five of the past six. This year, though, threw all kinds of adversity the Tigers way, and it also brought a much-improved Florida squad.

The women fell far behind the first two days of the meet before storming back on Friday to come within eight points of Florida heading into Saturday. They took a brief 0.5-point lead after Saturday’s 100 freestyle, when Wallace-Vanderpool finished second and Geary followed in third.

But Florida clinched on the second-to-last event, the 200 butterfly, when it placed three in the top eight, including first-place Jemma Lowe, while Auburn had just one participant, Ohlgren, who finished second.

“This team, especially after this weekend, truly believes they can compete at a championship level,” co-head women’s coach Dorsey Tierney-Walker said. “You never want to say second place is as good as first, and it’s not, but in this case, it may be as or more productive.”

No one was more productive at this week’s meet than Targett.

The senior Olympian from Australia won all seven events in which he competed, including Saturday’s 100 freestyle and the record-setting relay, where he was joined by Jakob Andkjaer, Gideon Louw and Kohlton Norys.

The four-day performance made Targett a no-brainer for SEC Male Swimmer of the Year.

“He’s amazing,” Hawke said. “He’s easily the best swimmer in the nation. He’s going to be hard to beat come NCAAs. We’re just glad he’s on our team.”

Hawke and Tierney-Walker garnered honors for Male and Female Coaches of the Year. Those awards, of course, were shared with Quick, who hung around for most of the meet before taking off shortly before the final awards’ ceremony.

“The fact that he even came here tonight means a lot to us,” Targett said “We just tried to show him how much he means to us.”

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